Making It Different – Pushing Genre Boundaries in Fantasy
by Martin Jenkins
One of the pleasures of genre is that it lets us identify a type of writing that we know we like. We’d feel short-changed if a crime novel didn’t feature a crime, after all, or if a romance didn’t put the travails of a relationship front and center. What we don’t want to see, however, is a mere repetition of genre tropes and clichés – it’s what is fresh and different in a work of fiction that keeps us turning the page while still being identifiably a genre work.
“Tools for the Toolbox” is a series of posts that describe disease types and organ systems. Eventually I hope to include enough information that a writer might be able to do some creative mixing and matching to produce the symptoms they want to give a character. Because it’s really frustrating to throw darts in the dark and hope something lands near the bull’s-eye. Hope it helps!